I normally wait and let other people suffer from Point Zero problems, but I got Leopard on release day and immediately upgraded. (This was written weeks ago)

Leopard would not install at first - the installer would boot, but my disk wasn’t shown. It was visible to Disk Utility, and it was even mounted (I like having a shell available in the installer!), but it would not appear. I tried three or four times. My boot partition was called “system”. On a hunch I changed its name and tried again, and it appeared immediately. I’ve not been able to repeat the experiment, so I’m not 100% sure the name was causing the problem.

The extras in the installer (Disk Utility, Terminal) are nice. A tetris game or web browser would have been even nicer, as the install took rather a long time*.

Network browsing (Samba, AFP) seems much better. Until now Mac OS hasn’t been very good at interacting with LAN file shares, but I think Leopard has got it right at last. Overall speed seemed good too. Windows tends to get slower with each new version, but Mac OS X gets faster.

LDAP and Kerberos integration is looking very strong indeed - all sorts of software can take advantage of directory information and Kerberos authentication. Apple are using Sun’s NFS automounter and it’s far better than static mounts: just browse on the commandline by cd-ing to servers by name, with Kerberos there to make NFS useful again. There are various LDAP tools that I expect to spend days playing with, like catnip for sysadmins.

Spotlight seems to be much more effective and faster. Previously I’ve not been impressed, but things like Smart Folders now look practical rather than just good in principle.

Coverflow views seem slow and gimmicky. Maybe on a faster Mac they’d be more fluid and responsive.

At first I dismissed the Finder’s new Quick Look preview feature as just a copy of similar elements of Windows and KDE desktops, but it’s turned out to be much more useful and convenient than I expected.

The Dock graphics seem to be a bit tattier. I like the reflective surface but the icons don’t look quite right. My Mac is a PPC Mac Mini without accelerated graphics, and I wonder if Apple are assuming more powerful Macs when optimising the display.

Leopard’s desktop style (especially the blue colour and icons) reminds me of an old Gnome theme. This is good.

Time Machine will not work with network drives, or DMG disk images on network drives. This is very disappointing.

Spaces provides a good implementation of multiple desktops, but there’s no facility to name the spaces. Clicking on the Spaces menu displays a list of numbered desktops with blank areas where names would fit, but there’s no way to set them. Odd.

The new voice is rather good. There’s just one, and I’ve heard better, but a huge improvement over the ancient ones.

SMB/CIFS mounts are faster and friendlier. There’s still no reliable way to get them to mount automatically on login other than via an Automator script, but that works well enough. I’m not sure if it would be better to use Samba for CIFS, or Netatalk for AFP.

The default desktop and login screen image is rather gloomy, and a strange choice. Replacing /System/Library/CoreServices/DefaultDesktop.jpg fixes that easily enough.

‘Get Info’ on the Finder’s contextual menus has moved, and ‘Move to Trash’ is dangerously close to where ‘Get Info’ used to be.

Bundled developer software is much better, with less need to head to MacPorts straight away. Subversion is there, Ruby, Ruby Gems, Mongrel and Ruby On Rails too, all with DTrace patches applied. Apple’s bundling of Ruby on Rails with all Macs is rather significant, I think.

I’m disappointed by the delayed arrival of ZFS and iSCSI in Mac OS. Hopefully they’ll turn up soon.

TextEdit can open and save OpenDocument (.odt) word processor files! This is good news.

X11.app seems to be broken somehow. It doesn’t X start from the Dock properly, and X forwarding over SSH during session setup following SSH logins fails - I can’t simply ssh to a Linux server and run graphical apps. It used to work fine under Tiger.

I’ve had very few problems with incompatible software. The only major trouble so far is that Missing Sync 5 won’t sync calendars properly (partly due to the authors not updating it, and partly due to bugs in iCal and iSync) and NeoOffice is refusing to open some files over CIFS. Overall I’m very pleased with Leopard but looking forward to improvements.

* Backing up before upgrading took even longer. Fortunately Metroid Prime 3 arrived the same morning, so I was distracted, confused and entertained by that instead.

I’m over-cautious and clumsy at the best of times. I’ve got a second camera lens now and changing them resembles a small-scale surgical operation, with various lids and bits laid out on a flat surface or balanced on bags. I felt like I needed an extra arm. Or a camera strap, I’ve just realised. I suspect I should worry less.

Links: Strobist: Pro Tip: How to Quick-Change an SLR lens and Changing Lenses on DSLR Cameras

This is how I’ve been trying to do it, but badly. There’s still a table involved though.

How To Change An SLR Lens

All that talk of dust remind me that The Golden Compass is out now.

I hate breaking hyperlinks but I’m at it again: this weblog is moving to another host, with slightly different URLs. I’ll redirect some of the old links for a month or so. The new Apetracks will be available at http://apetracks.binary-ape.org. If you’re using the FeedBurner feed then that will continue to work.

Until now I’ve been maintaining the software myself, hosting first on 34sp.com using MoveableType, then binary-ape.org moved to Textdrive, using Wordpress for the blog. Running the blog software yourself gives a lot freedom to customise, freedom from AUPs, and probably more freedom of speech. But it also requires a fair bit of maintenance. I’ve barely been updating the blog comments recently, so the overhead of regular Wordpress upgrades is just too much work. The current spate of self-hosted Wordpress blogs being compromised has emphasised this. I work as a sysadmin during the day, and maintaining PHP apps in my own time isn’t my idea of fun anymore, so I’m going to migrate Apetracks over to Typepad.

I attended a very interesting conference on OpenID recently. One theme that persisted across the presentations was the idea that it can be much more effective to use a variety of specialised online services rather than a single all-in-one provider. I’ve been singing the praises of ‘loose coupling’ and toolchains for a long time, and I think it’s time to apply this to my Internet services too. As well as moving my blogs to a commercial blog provider, and moving my mail to Fastmail.fm, and I’ve signed up with Slicehost to provide a VPS for messing about. DNS is already with the excellent Nettica It’s going to cost more than staying with Textdrive but hopefully I’ll get a lot more functionality for less effort, and not too much money.

Of course, I might regret this if the US dollar recovers…

While migrating over to Typepad I noticed that I’ve posted about 500 items to Apetracks since it started in 2002, but I’ve also started, but never posted, over 700 other items. If you think what I’ve posted is bad, you should see some of the stuff I never got round to finishing.

I did the sensible thing and deleted them all.

I also deleted a pile of recent, relatively decent drafts that would have been posted to the old Apetracks, had it not been playing up a bit. That wasn’t quite so sensible.

(Checking that Flickr can talk to the new blog)

A set of photos taken a couple of months ago in Heaton Park, with “Vera”, the new DSLR camera A. got me as an astonishingly good birthday present.

I don’t really know how to use most of it yet, but it’s fun to try.

I came across this image while reading a technical blog, and for a moment thought it was an unusual photo of Albert Square in Manchester. Then A. wandered in and also momentarily mistook it for Albert Square.

It’s actually Grand Place in Brussels.

Another summer disappearance comes to an end and I begin to live normal hours, and do normal things like watch TV, have a lie-in at the weekends, and not work every day. For the first few days there’s an edgy feeling and twinges of guilt: why am I not working? How many days left?

A notoriously workaholic colleague has described me as a fellow workaholic, but this isn’t accurate: I’m a seasonal workaholic. When I was interviewed for my current job I was warned that I should expect to be very busy in August and September. A code freeze in early August means the crunch occurs back across July too. I code, I test, I worry. Then each mid-September fifteen thousand new students arrive at once and get their IT account details. The dust settles, the code freeze thaws, the sleeping tablets are put away, and I go back to my usual work. This is my third year, and it’s gone very well.

Looking back, I’ve not got much to show for my work life so far. A few multimedia CD-ROMs on shelves in schools, a few pages buried in the Wayback machine, and a few scraps of config files from my sysadmin work (at most - upgrades and replacements soon wash away anything a sysadmin does). I am however very proud of my recent work: I’ve been able to do things properly - capacity planning, unit tests, automated acceptance testing, agile methods, clustering, documentation, accessibility, even watching and interviewing users. And it worked. It’s a very good application, possibly the best of its type in the world, with potential to be even better. I’ve had to put in a lot of extra hours to do this and still carry out my everyday work, but it was worth it. Even the sleepless nights worrying about what to do for 15,000 students if Bad Situation X occurred were worth it.

I left my previous job as a sysadmin with script-hacking skills, and I’ll leave this job as a sysadmin, identity management specialist, and successful developer.

Unfortunately the leaving might be sooner than I expected. The twist in this happy tale of development success is that higher management were seemingly unaware (or uninterested) in the account provisioning process (it was just something that happened) but now seem to be busy reorganising everything. Individual and team responsibility are out, procrustean micromanagement is in. The new way says that development should be centralised, and that a web developer can write complex identity management software better than an identity management specialist. I have been informed that a web site is just a web site, domain knowledge does not exist, and LDAP, SQL and encryption are technical trivialities.

It was good while it lasted. The past two years have been the best two working years of my life, but I’m going to look elsewhere if my role is dumbed down too far. Now that I’ve finally experienced job satisfaction I’m not going to give it up easily.

Current routine:

Work, lunch, work, dinner, work/Resident Evil 4 Wii/Moorcock novels

Here’s an exciting snap of me buying lunch (and future dinners) at 8th Day, taken by enigmatic man-about-town Dirke Beauregard.

8th Day had a DJ set involving wind-up 78 record players to publicise their rather good wind-up torches.

I don’t know what’s more worrying: that doctors make such amazingly bad terrorists (they didn’t even manage to blow up the car. It just burned. Kids in North Shields can do better than that), that people so utterly inept can qualify as doctors, or that the media haven’t noticed that these are the world’s most useless terrorists.

I don’t want them to be dangerous: I think we’d be better off laughing at how crappy they are, rather then hyping them in the media and doing their work (spreading fear) for them.

The last lot of suicide bombers we had in the UK made flour fizzle and then got arrested on TV in their underpants. All suicide bombers should be like that.

People frequently assume I read The Guardian. I don’t.

There were a few years when I bought it a couple of days a week. Then a few years when I bought it on Saturday. Then I realised that whoever it was written for, it certainly wasn’t written for me. I can find adverts for overpriced rubbish disguised as reviews, weak propaganda, sloppy journalism and ignorant punditry on the Internet, or write it myself. When The Guardian became key to keeping Blair in power unchecked (“hold your nose and vote Labour”) it became as unpurchasable as Murdoch’s rubbish.

Craig Murray posted the following to Comment Is Free, a sometimes quite decent site that is owned by The Guardian:

After I blogged the (indisputable) fact that no maritime boundary between Iran and Iraq in the Persian Gulf had ever been agreed and the MOD map was a fake with no legal force, it took some time to seep into the public consciousness. Eventually the Mail published it, then the BBC took it up, and eventually everyone except the mad people on the Harry’s Place blog accepted it as true. I have now been asked by the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee to produce a paper explaining it to them. The reason I note this here, is that before I did any of that, I phoned the Guardian and explained at length the problem with the map to David Leigh and Richard Norton Taylor. They took no notice whatever and the Guardian continued to reproduce the Blair fake boundary map as propaganda for weeks, with no hint there was a problem with it. This is very sad for me, as I remember the days when the Guardian was a newspaper and not a Blairite neo-con rag. I think that what the Guardian/Observer has become under the war criminal supporting White, Tisdall, Wintour, Toynbee and Cohen is a national disaster. Rusbridger is just a cypher in a very bad wig.

and then the whole thread magically disappeared from the front page and recent items list.

Link: Craig Murray - The Guardian and the Guilty

(One grumble per week)